Alone in The Universe

Walter's Niggun

Winter

Here is my musical interpretation of WINTER, the first of a suite of 4 seasons inspired by fibre art work by my wife Susan Avishai (www.susanavishai.com). You will see the score and a number of photos I've taken over the years which feel to me like they express visually what I was feeling musically, or perhaps the other way round. The 2 photos of skating on the Rideau Canal and skating at Toronto City Hall were taken from public domain sources.

Walter's Niggun is a Yiddish "earworm" ... a piece of musical doggerel that once heard can't be unheard. I was inspired by the singing of this niggun in the Ottawa Reconstructionist Havurah, founded by Dr. Walter Hendelman, who is a professor emeritus in the faculty of Medicine at University of Ottawa, and my colleague friend and mentor. This orchestral work is dedicated to him and his late wife Tina.

Alone in the Universe is a composition inspired by a fibre art piece of the same name by Susan Avishai. It depicts first the vastness and weirdness of space from its origins in the "big bang" , then moves to a musical representation of life on earth, then transitions back again to the mystery of space. The piece is atonal, not in the sense of Schoenberg's 12 tone system but in the fact that the music has no root key - chords change and modulate in an unconfined musical space. There are elements of tonal music from part to part, but no central "home". The video depicts both the MIDI notes as they are played, and is intercut with images form the NASA James Webb telescope and other NASA images taken in our galaxy and solar system.